ON Monday May 25th, David Laws, the new Chief Secretary of the Treasury, standing next to his master Chancellor Osborne, announced that the £6.2 bn of savage cuts that he had helped to draw up were ‘draconian’ and would send ‘shock waves’ through society.
As the chosen one of the Tory leader Cameron, he embodied ruthlessness, and revelled in his role of forcing down the throats of the masses the horrible medicine it was their national duty to swallow, and his to forcibly administer.
By Saturday 29th, the ‘colossus’ was no more, hoist by his own petard, after the scourge of the expenses abusers was shown to have fed £40,000 of tax payers’ cash in expenses to his ‘partner’ for the hire of one of his bedrooms.
To make matters worse, he was brought down by the Tory Telegraph, which purchased the MPs’ expenses file, and used it to purge parliament in the year before the general election.
The idea of the purge was to be able to return the Tory party with a huge majority to put the Welfare State to the sword, and resolve the capitalist crisis for the ruling class.
However, the working class would not have the Tories back, and all that the Telegraph got for its money was a minority Tory regime that had to make a deal with the Liberal-Democrats to survive, to be able to announce the £6.2bn cuts and go forward to an emergency budget after 50 days.
This coalition however brought forward policies that the Telegraph and Toryism were not prepared to stomach, particularly the increase in capital gains tax which was held to be a measure that would crush the Tory upper middle class. The Tory Party was and remains furious.
Its response was, through the new Telegraph expenses revelation, to bring the haughty Treasury Chief Secretary down, to show that they are capable of bringing the coalition down, despite the fact that there is nothing on the right to replace it.
The ruling class now has a crisis of leadership.
In the 1930s they were able to bring together a national government led by Ramsay MacDonald that imposed dole cuts, wage cuts and pension cuts to make the working class and the middle class pay for the crisis.
The way was prepared by the defeat of the 1926 general strike, which was betrayed by the TUC after nine days of strike action, that was growing every day, even after it was officially called off.
Today, the ruling class faces a working class that is undefeated and is determined not to be defeated. The tenacity, stubbornness and determination of the BA cabin crew is an example of this undefeated nature. It even made the Court of Appeal think again about declaring their strike illegal.
The bourgeois media are now saying that the resigned Laws will be back in the autumn. However, the reason that they had to let him go in the spring is that they would not be able to mount an assault on the working class after the emergency budget led by an expenses offender.
He had to go and as the class struggle sharpens more will follow him.
However, the working class must resolve its own crisis of leadership.
The current trade union leadership is on its knees, to the point where the leaders of Unite declare publicly that they do not want to win the BA struggle and are prepared to concede every economic demand that the BA bosses are making.
The tenacity of the working class is keeping this battle going, but there will be a price to pay if this leadership is not removed and replaced by a new leadership.
There must be a demand made at the Unite Conference, that begins today, for all Unite members to be brought out in support of the BA cabin crew and that the union passes an emergency resolution calling for the TUC to call a general strike to win the struggle.
In fact, the TUC must decide that it will react to the emergency budget by calling a general strike to bring down the weak Tory-led coalition and bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies.
This is not just a British struggle. It is a European and world struggle of workers fighting to smash capitalism internationally.
We must ally ourselves with the workers of the world and fight for socialism in Britain as part of a Socialist United States of Europe, and a world socialist republic. Only the WRP fights for this perspective.
Join it today.